First day on the ship is all about finding your way around. We had mandatory briefings about the use of RHIBs. We were loaned some snorkelling gear. We discovered the restaurants and bars. We attended a lecture about Komodo dragons. In the evening there was a gala dinner. Some people got dressed up for this. I put my cleanest shirt on but still managed to enjoy the champagne. Life from a 23 kg suitcase does not allow for dressing up clothes.
The Komodo Dragon is the biggest lizard in the world. Up to 3m long and 150 kg. These monitor lizards are endemic to a handful of Indonesian islands in the Komodo National Park. They are the apex predator and live off a diet of deer, wild boar and carrion. The Komodo dragon was the driving factor for an expedition to Komodo Island by Douglas Burden in 1926. They returned with 12 preserved specimens and two live ones. This expedition provided the inspiration for the 1933 movie King Kong.
We arrived early in the morning. A few people live on the island and they had set up a small market area to sell things to tourists. We were divided up into small groups. Each group had a guide and two national park rangers armed with long sticks. They went in front and behind the main group. Occasionally, dragons attack and bite humans. Sometimes they consume human corpses, digging up bodies from shallow graves. This habit of raiding graves caused the villagers of Komodo to move their graves from sandy to clay ground, and pile rocks on top of them, to deter the lizards. The guide was just explaining how it was not guaranteed that we would see any dragons when one wandered past the market area.
These dragons do not breath fire but they are still fearsome warriors. Komodo dragon skin is reinforced by armoured scales, which contain tiny bones called osteoderms that function as a sort of natural chainmail. They have orange, iron-enriched coatings on their tooth serrations and tips, as an adaptation for maintaining the sharp cutting edges. It used to be thought that the bacteria on their teeth could make even a small bite ultimately fatal. This has since been disproved. Dragons do have venom glands that secrete several different toxic proteins. The extent to which these are used for killing prey is uncertain.
We walked round a track through the forest. It was only quite short although the whole trip took nearly two hours with many stops to listen to the guide and watch the dragons. In all, we saw half a dozen dragons. They did not appear to take much notice of us. One of them was digging out a nest.
We got to an area where we could smell decaying meat. There was not anything to see but the guide assured us that a dragon had been eating here. Loosely articulated jaws, flexible skulls, and expandable stomachs allow them to swallow prey whole. Copious amounts of red saliva help to lubricate the food. Sometimes a dragon will ram the carcass against a tree to force it down its throat. A single meal can be 80% of their body weight. This means they only need to eat every few weeks.
Further down the track, our guide pointed out a young dragon in a tree. Poaching and loss of habitat make the dragon endangered these days. Across the whole Komodo National Park there are about 3000 dragons left. Young dragons mostly live up trees where the mature reptiles cannot catch and eat them.
I was quite happy to get to the end of the track. It was very hot and I was starting to wilt. Our route was arranged so that we needed to go through the market area to get back on the ship. There were t-shirts, little model dragons and various other tat that looked suspiciously like it was mass produced in China.
In the afternoon, the ship moved to another island, without dragons, and we went snorkelling. Diane’s first ever snorkel. She was a bit nervous but soon got used to it. Buoyed up by two pool noodles she was soon swimming around like a pro.
